Enter Sadmen: The Hard Rock & Heavy Metal Hall of Fame

In this episode the Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes set the lads the task of finding three albums or bands that were in some way linked to criminal acts. And not just misdemeanours, thank you very much - these had to be crimes for which jail time would not only be inevitable, but also very lengthy.

For this edition of the podcast the lads are being driven to drink. Not literally, because that would be irresponsible. No, this time the Sadmen had to find an album each that had a link to alcohol.

Richard travelled back to Canada to pick up Nature Of The Beast, an album thought by many to be the finest hour of April Wine.

Steve opted for the comfort of 1986 and the rock-lite Thrill Of A Lifetime by Carmine Appice vehicle King Kobra.

Mark, ever the adventurer, went a little off-piste and turned up with Behind The Eight Ball (an Eight Ball being both a whisket cocktail and a drug cocktaIl. Apparently) from German power metal band Thunderhead.

The Tico Torres Tombola of Topics & Themes handed out a banger for this episode, with Mark, Steve and Richard tasked with finding three albums released between 1970 and 1995 that had a tangible link to the subject of 'school'. 

Mark opted for something a little on the nose and mined his old timetable for some clues. After rejecting Bad English. and with the well of ideas running dry, he opted for something that was about as polar in its oppositeness to Master Of Puppets as it was possible to get. Welcome, then, Sport Of Kings from Canadian rockers Triumph - also released in 1986.

And so, to Richard, who has always had an incidental relationship with the spirit of the few rules that exist on the show. Which is why we'll leave him to explain the ludicrously tenuous link to 'school' that he managed to contrive as justification for turning up to the recording session with Dare's 1988 offering, Out Of The Silence, under his arm ...

The boys didn't have to venture too far for the latest episode of the podcast - in fact, just a short hop and skip on Eurostar across La Manche and straight on to Paris.

In the latest episode of the Sadmen's journey down a rock and roll highway that starts in 1970(ish) and ends in 1995(ish), the lads pull out the corduroys and the paisley shirts and head for the warm bath of psychedelic bewilderment that was 1972.

So, in this episode the lads were eached tasked to find an album with a tangible (this word is important) link to the letter H.

Yes, we know. You're squinting at the episode title and the featured bands and wracking your brain to think of a Pink Floyd album beginning with H. Let us help you out: there isn't one. A, O, U, S, P, D, W, M and F, all present and correct. H? Not so much. Anyway, we'll let Richard explain his bizarre rationale for bringing 1975's Wish You Were Here to the table.

Back in the real world, Mark managed to unearth an old gem from 1982 with the long-since forgotten (at least, outside Canada) Turn It Loud from Headpins, while Steve grazed on the lush hinterland of late-80s hair metal with Hurricane's 1988 eponymous debut offering.

So this episode is all about the albums you bought and lisened to and thought, fuck me that's a great album! Or possibly, fuck me, that's terrible! And then, 30 years later, you discovered your opinion had done a 180 degree turn.

In this episode, Mark revisits the much maligned Black Sabbath experiment that saw Ian Gillan step up to the mic, Steve discovers that Ratt's Detonator tickles his ears a little differently to he way it did in 1990, and Richard recalls he moment Van Hagar suddenly made sense ....

Yes, Sadfans, we're giving over our 75th episode to the unsung heroes of every band that ever set foot in a recording studio or onto a stage - those apparently indefatigable timekeepers without whom there would be little or no momentum.

Stuck behind the kit at the back of the stage, these are the artisans of the hard rock and heavy metal engine room.

Whether it's a sense of rhythm combined with a diver's boot (h/t to Gillan's Mick Underwood), the professorial science of Neil Peart, or the tour de force blunt trauma approach of Bonzo, these are the men and women who provide the metronome when you're standing with your feet apart and headbanging your way to an early aneurysm.

Naturally, the list of noteworthy sticksmen is ineffably long, so consider this part one of a theme the Sadmen will undoubtedly return to in episodes to come.

But for this episode the lads have picked three drummers who have, to some extent, shaped the technical art of hitting the skins with a lump of wood.

First up, Phil Collins in his second outing with Genesis for 1972's Foxtrot. Having already helped to shape the Charterhouse proggers' sound on his debut release, Nursery Cryme the year before, Collins, Banks, Gabriel and Rutherford return a year later with a release that would achieve immortality in the genre.

The boys' next stop was six years later, as Y&T - then known still as Yesterday and Today - drop their sophomore 1978 release Struck Down. Though three years away from the standard-bearing  Earthshaker, this is the album that perhaps best showcases the undeniable talent of their man on the kit, Leonard Haze.

And the lads round off proceedings with Jeff Pocaro and TOTO's commercial juggernaut IV, which boasts the ghost notes on album opener Rosanna that to this day separate the men from the boys when it comes to high drumming art.

Enjoy!

Episode 74 sees the lads tackling the subject of inventions. If ever there was scope to push the envelope on a theme this, surely, is it. And so it proved, as Mark fishes out a set of what can only be described as 15th Century blueprints to qualify Dokken's 1981 debut, Breakin' The Chains.

(Don't get antsy, America - we know the better known version of the album was released in Amercia in 1983 with a title tweak - Breaking The Chains rather than Breakin' The Chains - and a very different running order, but where there's a reissue the Sadmen always take the original release for the review - and, besides, in this case it has a better back story!)

Not for the first time on the podcast, Rich went soft, opting for a post-Balboa and post-Dave Bickler Survivor and their 1984 album Vital Signs (the invention? An oscilloscope ... yeah, yeah ... they're all tenuous on this show, friends).

And (also not for the first time) Steve went hard, opting for a band that has never actually existed with Piledriver's Stay Ugly from 1986. And if you don't know the PIledriver back story, that's worth this episode's admission price alone. (The admission is free, by the way. You know ... just in case that's a dealbreaker).

The latest episode of the Enter Sadmen podcast finds the boys in more familiar territory as the Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes serves up 'Death' as the theme for Episode 73.

As it was, Mark arrived at the Sadmen party with an album in another one of those covers that, much like the Scorpions Lovedrive, had post-pubescent teenagers nursing a boner in the record shop.

Witchfinder General's 1982 debut Death Penalty, was a marketing man's dream, yet the band still managed to evade mainstream celebrity. The songs on offer may provide good clues as to why, but Mark argues that there's lots of fun to be had ... if, in 2023, you can get beyond the gratuitous presence of female breasts on the cover.

And so to Steve and Richard,m who could have gone with pretty much anything buit instead chose to plough a furrow in Scandinavia's death metal scene.

First up, Richard with the npw-legendary Epicus Doomicus Metallicus from Candlemass - a 1986 release that was determinedly ignored by the record-buying public until after the band was dropped by its record company - at which point they went out and bought it by the truckload.

And finally, in this episode, Steve puts forward the case for Entombed's Wolverine Blues, now a neo-classic, but then, in 1993, another radar-avoiding old skool throwback.